Actually, MS has been using the word Surface for some time now. Their large touch-screen computing "tables" go under the Surface name. Why not continue to use the name for a small touch-screen tablet? After all, the word Surface somewhat implies a touch interface.
Exactly why is the X13x series not a real ThinkPad? I have an X131 with a Core i3 dual-core (with HT), 8 gigs of RAM and a non-glare, useful-resolution screen. I can easily run a guest VM using VirtualBox with 2 cores dedicated to the VM and the performance is fine. It gets 5-6 hours on battery. It's not covered with fingerprint-magnet shiny plastic. It's about as anti-netbook as a small laptop can be.
Um... support? Are you able to get replacement parts from a Chinese assembler after 1-2 years? With the average model churn of these companies I doubt you can get replacement parts after 2 months...
Holy crap, the US telecoms are still ass-raping customers. $50 for a gig of data, are they crazy? Here in Finland I have a 3.5G mobile hotspot (21 Mbps) that supports up to 8 devices with UNLIMITED data... wait for it... $12/month. And I recently heard that one of the operators has a data-only SIM plan for HALF that. My hotspot works all over the whole country without roaming charges too.
It seems the US telecom companies are just inventing new and creative ways to screw over their customers... without spending any of that money on upgrading their infrastructure.
Fits all the requirements mentioned except a boom mic, although they were a tad over $50 new. It's a non-current model but you may be able to find them online. Very flat, full frequency response, no boosted bass. Definitely the best ~$50 headphones I've ever owned, and I have some other fairly expensive open-back headphones as well. These are definitely one of the best under $150 closed-back headphones. For those that don't know, designing a good sounding closed-back (isolating) headphone is really hard, which is why most cheap headphones are open-backed (non isolating). It's far easier to design good sounding headphones when you don't care about sound isolation.
As some others have recommended the Sennheiser PX100's are also great, but they bleed a lot of sound to the environment and have zero isolation. They are not as long-term comfortable as the HD 448's either, since the 448 is circumaural (around the ear, not on the ear like PX100's). The HD 448's are good for portable use since they have a 3.5mm (1/8") jack and not a full sized 6.3mm (1/4") jack like many higher end headphones.
In any case, it's really hard to go wrong with anything in the Sennheiser range, although some of their cheaper models have boosted bass so you need to carefully check the description when selecting a model. I can't stand headphones with boosted bass, they are very fatiguing to listen to after a while and I prefer a flat frequency response anyway.
Long-time Gnome2 user, and have mostly switched over to Xfce-based distros. At the moment I'm liking Mint a lot, with Cinnamon on my faster machines and MATE on less capable ones. I also recently discovered that Ubuntu Studio uses Xfce, so my Ubuntu machines have been moved over to that. I have a really old (~1999) dual processor HP workstation which has not been very tolerant of newer distros, although I have not yet been able to install Mint with MATE on it. I suspect it will work well.
I tried KDE back in the 1.x-2.x days and just never really fell in love with it. It just seemed too toy-like, and it's really annoying as hell that every app seems to be named ksomething. Maybe it's not like that today, but I still see a lot of ksomething apps in the repos.
I'm the last one to defend Apple, but please do tell me where you are going to buy a display with 2880x1800 pixels at any size and still meet the rest of the specs under the same budget?
... and lose access to your job-sponsored benefits. And hopefully you don't have a "pre-existing condition" that keeps you from getting good coverage ever again without paying through the nose.
False. The US still has the cheapest gas in comparison to all other first-world nations by a significant amount. I would wager that gas in Europe is much closer to paying the "true cost" of gas, where we pay about 2.5 times what the US pays for gas. The differences are in taxes, where the US taxes gas at a very low rate compared to other countries and fuel subsidies which cover up the real cost of gas.
Perhaps you are right, but I guarantee the person drinking soda full of HFCS will have a LOT more health problems than the person drinking soda flavored with cane sugar. They may both be overweight but the odds are heavily stacked against HFCS.
I'm also lucky enough to live in a country not infected by this shit called HFCS.
I think you're giving Romney too much credit. I believe his statement is nothing more than pandering to the left and non-creationists in order to get votes. I do not seriously think this is what he actually believes in.
Not for me it won't. Try to imagine how tiring it will be to type on a non-mechanical keyboard with almost zero feedback. Also, note the resurgence of high-quality mechanical keyboards that have appeared in the last couple years that use high quality Cherry switches. Except for special applications, the standard keyboard isn't going anywhere when you need a large amount of text input.
I'm having a hard time coming up with the problem this solves, outside of creating a braille touchscreen "keyboard". Obviously, the liquid needs to be transparent so you can see the touchscreen underneath, which means the buttons have to rely on icons displayed on the LCD to indicate what the button does. So, you can now have a raised button on top of an icon on a touchscreen. Please excuse me as I don't get too excited over this. This looks like a solution in search of a problem...
If it ultimately fails in Europe, ACTA is effectively dead. It doesn't matter what happens with China at that point if Europe doesn't sign on. I don't recall the number immediately, but there is a minimum number of countries that must sign the agreement for it to be valid and with the European countries out of the mix there aren't enough first-world countries left to achieve the minimum required.
Thanks to the grassroots movement here in the EU, the politicians are finally seeing the light that we do not want ACTA in any shape or form. This is how democracy should work.
I believe the most significant quote from the statement is this:
"United States is attempting to utilize concepts from the civil copyright context as a basis for the application of criminal copyright liability [which] necessitates a consideration of principles such as the dual use of technology and what they be described as significant non-infringing uses."
In other words, the NZ government realizes this is a misuse of the justice system to allow the US government to prosecute a civil case as a criminal one without giving the defendant access to evidence. The significant problem here is that the rights of the right-holder is being held to a higher standard than the rights of the defendant in this case.
I'm not attempting to say Mr. Dotcom is completely innocent in this case, but the US legal system has destroyed his business, confiscated his assets and likely taken away his future without due process and without a conviction of any crime at this point. Innocent until proven guilty, anyone?
Health costs are not paid for out of nothing. If a person's living expenses exceed the value of what he produces, he is a net burden on society. He then lives either on charity or theft (one form of theft is getting support from the government.)
Did you SERIOUSLY just imply that someone who gets seriously injured or chronically ill is a THIEF for taking advantage of social and welfare systems available to them when they are not able to work? Really?
Hate to reply to an AC, but you have a great point. Too bad you didn't post under your own identity and take credit.
It's much the same here in Finland, we have a lot of bandwidth and it's cheap. I pay US $12/month for an UNLIMITED 3.5G 21Mbps connection using a mobile hotspot that supports up to 8 devices. No bandwidth caps, no limitations, zilch. I've had 24Mbps ADSL to my home for many years, unlimited. The only reason why I haven't upgraded to 100Mbps at home is my ADSL+ gateway would need to be replaced, and to be honest I have enough bandwidth for what I need anyway.
I don't want to hear the usual "but the US is too big and sparsely populated" excuse, please. That's a load of BS. Finland has a large landmass for its population size and is only 2% populated by area. The rest of the land is forests. Yet we have dozens of mobile operators and ISP's competing well with low prices, good service and coverage over the whole damn country. The US has put off building infrastructure for so long and raping customers for crappy service, that it's unlikely to be able to catch up to the rest of the world in 10 years. It's falling behind at an alarming pace, and with religious zealots and corporations now firmly in control of the population and government, you are pretty screwed.
It's equally bad that I say this as an American who left the country more than 10 years ago and has witnessed the country slowly destroying itself from afar. Truly sad.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, MS has been using the word Surface for some time now. Their large touch-screen computing "tables" go under the Surface name. Why not continue to use the name for a small touch-screen tablet? After all, the word Surface somewhat implies a touch interface.
Not according to the politicians who were bought.
Exactly why is the X13x series not a real ThinkPad? I have an X131 with a Core i3 dual-core (with HT), 8 gigs of RAM and a non-glare, useful-resolution screen. I can easily run a guest VM using VirtualBox with 2 cores dedicated to the VM and the performance is fine. It gets 5-6 hours on battery. It's not covered with fingerprint-magnet shiny plastic. It's about as anti-netbook as a small laptop can be.
Um... support? Are you able to get replacement parts from a Chinese assembler after 1-2 years? With the average model churn of these companies I doubt you can get replacement parts after 2 months...
But then again, you have to live in Canada.
But then again, some might see that as an upgrade.
Holy crap, the US telecoms are still ass-raping customers. $50 for a gig of data, are they crazy? Here in Finland I have a 3.5G mobile hotspot (21 Mbps) that supports up to 8 devices with UNLIMITED data... wait for it... $12/month. And I recently heard that one of the operators has a data-only SIM plan for HALF that. My hotspot works all over the whole country without roaming charges too.
It seems the US telecom companies are just inventing new and creative ways to screw over their customers... without spending any of that money on upgrading their infrastructure.
Fits all the requirements mentioned except a boom mic, although they were a tad over $50 new. It's a non-current model but you may be able to find them online. Very flat, full frequency response, no boosted bass. Definitely the best ~$50 headphones I've ever owned, and I have some other fairly expensive open-back headphones as well. These are definitely one of the best under $150 closed-back headphones. For those that don't know, designing a good sounding closed-back (isolating) headphone is really hard, which is why most cheap headphones are open-backed (non isolating). It's far easier to design good sounding headphones when you don't care about sound isolation.
As some others have recommended the Sennheiser PX100's are also great, but they bleed a lot of sound to the environment and have zero isolation. They are not as long-term comfortable as the HD 448's either, since the 448 is circumaural (around the ear, not on the ear like PX100's). The HD 448's are good for portable use since they have a 3.5mm (1/8") jack and not a full sized 6.3mm (1/4") jack like many higher end headphones.
In any case, it's really hard to go wrong with anything in the Sennheiser range, although some of their cheaper models have boosted bass so you need to carefully check the description when selecting a model. I can't stand headphones with boosted bass, they are very fatiguing to listen to after a while and I prefer a flat frequency response anyway.
Long-time Gnome2 user, and have mostly switched over to Xfce-based distros. At the moment I'm liking Mint a lot, with Cinnamon on my faster machines and MATE on less capable ones. I also recently discovered that Ubuntu Studio uses Xfce, so my Ubuntu machines have been moved over to that. I have a really old (~1999) dual processor HP workstation which has not been very tolerant of newer distros, although I have not yet been able to install Mint with MATE on it. I suspect it will work well.
I tried KDE back in the 1.x-2.x days and just never really fell in love with it. It just seemed too toy-like, and it's really annoying as hell that every app seems to be named ksomething. Maybe it's not like that today, but I still see a lot of ksomething apps in the repos.
I'm pretty sure USB 3.0 was added to all the Macbooks...
I'm the last one to defend Apple, but please do tell me where you are going to buy a display with 2880x1800 pixels at any size and still meet the rest of the specs under the same budget?
That's Asplundh.
... and lose access to your job-sponsored benefits. And hopefully you don't have a "pre-existing condition" that keeps you from getting good coverage ever again without paying through the nose.
False. The US still has the cheapest gas in comparison to all other first-world nations by a significant amount. I would wager that gas in Europe is much closer to paying the "true cost" of gas, where we pay about 2.5 times what the US pays for gas. The differences are in taxes, where the US taxes gas at a very low rate compared to other countries and fuel subsidies which cover up the real cost of gas.
Perhaps you are right, but I guarantee the person drinking soda full of HFCS will have a LOT more health problems than the person drinking soda flavored with cane sugar. They may both be overweight but the odds are heavily stacked against HFCS.
I'm also lucky enough to live in a country not infected by this shit called HFCS.
If you get it back, it's a deposit not a tax.
I think you're giving Romney too much credit. I believe his statement is nothing more than pandering to the left and non-creationists in order to get votes. I do not seriously think this is what he actually believes in.
Hint: The interwebs are global. Who the fuck cares where a site is based?
Now, go back to your parent's basement and close the door.
... and collecting evidence in an illegal manner, as happened here, causes the evidence to be inadmissible in court.
Not for me it won't. Try to imagine how tiring it will be to type on a non-mechanical keyboard with almost zero feedback. Also, note the resurgence of high-quality mechanical keyboards that have appeared in the last couple years that use high quality Cherry switches. Except for special applications, the standard keyboard isn't going anywhere when you need a large amount of text input.
I'm having a hard time coming up with the problem this solves, outside of creating a braille touchscreen "keyboard". Obviously, the liquid needs to be transparent so you can see the touchscreen underneath, which means the buttons have to rely on icons displayed on the LCD to indicate what the button does. So, you can now have a raised button on top of an icon on a touchscreen. Please excuse me as I don't get too excited over this. This looks like a solution in search of a problem...
If it ultimately fails in Europe, ACTA is effectively dead. It doesn't matter what happens with China at that point if Europe doesn't sign on. I don't recall the number immediately, but there is a minimum number of countries that must sign the agreement for it to be valid and with the European countries out of the mix there aren't enough first-world countries left to achieve the minimum required.
Thanks to the grassroots movement here in the EU, the politicians are finally seeing the light that we do not want ACTA in any shape or form. This is how democracy should work.
I believe the most significant quote from the statement is this:
"United States is attempting to utilize concepts from the civil copyright context as a basis for the application of criminal copyright liability [which] necessitates a consideration of principles such as the dual use of technology and what they be described as significant non-infringing uses."
In other words, the NZ government realizes this is a misuse of the justice system to allow the US government to prosecute a civil case as a criminal one without giving the defendant access to evidence. The significant problem here is that the rights of the right-holder is being held to a higher standard than the rights of the defendant in this case.
I'm not attempting to say Mr. Dotcom is completely innocent in this case, but the US legal system has destroyed his business, confiscated his assets and likely taken away his future without due process and without a conviction of any crime at this point. Innocent until proven guilty, anyone?
Health costs are not paid for out of nothing. If a person's living expenses exceed the value of what he produces, he is a net burden on society. He then lives either on charity or theft (one form of theft is getting support from the government.)
Did you SERIOUSLY just imply that someone who gets seriously injured or chronically ill is a THIEF for taking advantage of social and welfare systems available to them when they are not able to work? Really?
Surely, you mean iNet.
Hate to reply to an AC, but you have a great point. Too bad you didn't post under your own identity and take credit.
It's much the same here in Finland, we have a lot of bandwidth and it's cheap. I pay US $12/month for an UNLIMITED 3.5G 21Mbps connection using a mobile hotspot that supports up to 8 devices. No bandwidth caps, no limitations, zilch. I've had 24Mbps ADSL to my home for many years, unlimited. The only reason why I haven't upgraded to 100Mbps at home is my ADSL+ gateway would need to be replaced, and to be honest I have enough bandwidth for what I need anyway.
I don't want to hear the usual "but the US is too big and sparsely populated" excuse, please. That's a load of BS. Finland has a large landmass for its population size and is only 2% populated by area. The rest of the land is forests. Yet we have dozens of mobile operators and ISP's competing well with low prices, good service and coverage over the whole damn country. The US has put off building infrastructure for so long and raping customers for crappy service, that it's unlikely to be able to catch up to the rest of the world in 10 years. It's falling behind at an alarming pace, and with religious zealots and corporations now firmly in control of the population and government, you are pretty screwed.
It's equally bad that I say this as an American who left the country more than 10 years ago and has witnessed the country slowly destroying itself from afar. Truly sad.